Remaking Respectability

African American Women in Interwar Detroit

Victoria W. Wolcott

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780807849668, 9780807826379
• eBook ISBN: 9781469611006
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of African Americans arrived at Detroit’s Michigan Central Station, part of the Great Migration of blacks who left the South seeking improved economic and political conditions in the urban North. The most visible of these migrants have been the male industrial workers who labored on the city’s automobile assembly lines. African American women have largely been absent from traditional narratives of the Great Migration because they were excluded from industrial work. By placing these women at the center of her study, Victoria Wolcott reveals their vital role in shaping life in interwar Detroit.

Wolcott takes us into the speakeasies, settlement houses, blues clubs, storefront churches, employment bureaus, and training centers of Prohibition- and depression-era Detroit. There, she explores the wide range of black women’s experiences, focusing particularly on the interactions between working- and middle-class women. As Detroit’s black population grew exponentially, women not only served as models of bourgeois respectability, but also began to reshape traditional standards of deportment in response to the new realities of their lives. In so doing, Wolcott says, they helped transform black politics and culture. Eventually, as the depression arrived, female respectability as a central symbol of reform was supplanted by a more strident working-class activism.

1 Female Uplift Ideology, the Politics of Class, and Resettlement in Detroit

I was really proud to hear from you and know that you are getting on so well. Indeed I’m uplifted to hear what you are doing. I’m forced to write these paragraphs.... Now you are doing so well and I’m sure looking likewise you are going to have many temptations along your pilgrim journey. Let me urge, intreat and beseech that you continue to pray asking God for his comfort that his Guiding arms will be around you his eye will direct you to the better paths of life. Now you will have no time to pause, for satan you will find very busy and is like God somewhat.... With all our prayers and carefulness we are made to have the path of righteousness.
“Aunt Sarah” to Mary Etta Glenn, 29 January 1922

When Mary Etta Glenn migrated from Bibb County, Georgia, to Detroit in 1917, she left behind her mother, grandmother, and aunt, but she carried the ideas and values she was raised to uphold. After settling in the North, Glenn continued to receive advice from her family on how to behave as she grew to womanhood. “Hold up your head and be a sweet girl,” advised her grandmother in a letter. “I am glad to know you are having a good time,” wrote her mother, adding the caution, “Don’t take so much air riding in your friends’ new car.” Aunt Sarah entreated Glenn to follow a “path of righteousness” now that she was older and vulnerable to the “many temptations” of urban life. Yet this plea was tempered with a sense of pride in Glenn’s accomplishments.¹ Glenn’s mother and grandmother similarly stressed their pride in her, while encouraging her to be cautious in her new surroundings.

The Motor City had already welcomed thousands from Georgia, the most common point of origin for Detroit migrants, when fifteen-year-old Mary Etta Glenn arrived to join extended family members.² Indeed, May 1917, the month Glenn arrived in Detroit, was the beginning of the most active summer of north-bound migration to Detroit, and Glenn was one of an estimated thousand migrants to arrive in that month alone.³ By 1922, the year Glenn’s Aunt Sarah wrote her from Georgia, Detroit’s African American population had increased sixfold. By 1925, another 40,000 African American migrants joined Detroit’s burgeoning black community.⁴ Although many of these migrants were African American men attracted by the promise of employment in Detroit’s booming automobile industry, the majority of migrants cited noneconomic reasons for their movement north.⁵ These noneconomic motives included the availability of public education for migrant children, an opportunity Glenn and others quickly took advantage of.

After she arrived in Detroit, Glenn attended public school, completing a commercial course at the Detroit High School of Commerce in 1922.⁶ A year later, she obtained a white-collar job with the Detroit Post Office. The pride her family felt at this accomplishment, an accomplishment directly related to her migration, is clearly expressed in the letters quoted above. Yet this pride is tempered with a sense of concern from her female relatives. Would Glenn be “tempted” by the city’s commercial recreation and secular lifestyle? How would she handle the virulent racism of Detroit’s white employers and homeowners? Perhaps it was this concern that led Glenn’s mother to encourage her to visit a friend living in Detroit. “I am sending you one of my friends addresses and I want you to go to see her,” wrote Glenn’s mother; “she said she had been expecting you to see her so be sure and see her.”⁷ Glenn’s mother hoped her friend could guide her daughter through young adulthood and help her uphold the values of respectability Glenn had first learned in the South.

The letters from Glenn’s female relatives reflect the continuing impact of southern norms of respectability on northern female migrants. Racial uplift ideology, which espoused bourgeois respectability and flourished in the South, shaped the social and institutional context Glenn entered when she arrived in Detroit. Glenn was an active member of Detroit’s Second Baptist Church, for example, whose pastor hired social workers and developed programs to instruct new migrants in cleanliness, domestic skills, and deportment. She also helped organize a neighborhood improvement organization that publicized the need to keep homes and yards clean and orderly, a preoccupation of many African American reformers during the early twentieth century.⁸ In order to appreciate Glenn’s migration experience, one must understand the continuities between her childhood in Georgia and her adulthood in Detroit.

Glenn’s family in Georgia encountered local and national conceptions of respectability in the decades prior to the Great Migration. Bourgeois respectability was most fully articulated in middle-class reformers’ rhetoric of uplift ideology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This national discourse emerged in dialogue with southern working-class women, who were targeted by reformers as most in need of “uplift.” The interaction of elite and working-class women both strengthened uplift ideology and helped define class differences in the African American community. The emergence of a public discourse of respectability also shaped the African American community’s institutional response to the Great Migration. During the late 1910s and 1920s, the Detroit Urban League, established churches, women’s clubs, and other organizations used the language of female respectability and uplift prevalent in the years prior to migration. Middle-class notions of Victorian womanhood, a key component of the discourse of respectability, whose salience had declined in the white community by the late 1910s, continued to be espoused by African American reformers in Detroit through the 1920s. For Glenn and thousands of other migrants like her, the language of respectability was a central part of the migration experience.

Female Uplift Ideology

In 1903, Charles Chesnutt wrote: “The rights of the Negroes are at a lower ebb than at any time during the thirty-five years of their freedom, and the race prejudice more intense and uncompromising.”⁹ It was during this dark period of disenfranchisement, segregation, and violence that a number of ideological strands coalesced around racial uplift ideology. This ideology viewed the empowerment of African Americans as an evolutionary struggle, celebrated individual hard work in the tradition of Protestantism, and stressed a bourgeois moral code of appropriate behavioral norms.¹⁰ Racial uplift at times operated as a “public transcript”—an open discourse that would appeal to moderate whites in the South, which has led some scholars to focus on its accommodationist tendencies.¹¹ However, uplift ideology also operated within African American traditions of reform and evangelical progress. A close examination of uplift leaders reveals a diverse and complex range of ideas behind their reform efforts. These educators and activists can also be credited with building the institutional base that would serve African Americans throughout the twentieth century.¹² Ida B. Wells’s courageous efforts to curb lynching, for example, were clearly not the actions of an individual avoiding confrontation with southern political leaders. Thus, rather than representing accommodation to racist politics, uplift ideology sometimes masked resistance to the South’s dominant power structure. It was essentially neither accommodationist nor resistant but part of a shifting strategy by community leaders who were both reacting to the oppressive political climate and creating new routes to empowerment through institution building and reform work.¹³

Uplift ideology emerged during the “woman’s era,” a period in which African American female school founders, lecturers, writers, and artists gained widespread notoriety for their activism. Writing at the height of this period in her landmark 1892 book, A Voice from the South, educator and scholar Anna Julia Cooper argued: “Now the fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point of its progress upward, must be the black woman.”¹⁴ At the turn of the century, African American periodicals contained numerous articles linking the needs and aspirations of black women to the advancement of the race.¹⁵ As a result, womanhood and domesticity became powerful tropes in the language of racial uplift during the Progressive period. This language linking female respectability to racial empowerment shaped the institutional and ideological response to the Great Migration in Detroit well into the 1920s.

In racial uplift ideology, clear divisions between classes and distinct social roles for men and women provided evidence of racial advancement. Advocates of racial uplift viewed the gender and class integration of the African American community as an impediment to racial progress and a sign of social disorganization. Crowded urban neighborhoods became targets of reformers disturbed by the mixing of classes, races, and genders on city streets. Prominent female reformer Fannie Barrier Williams, for example, wrote in a 1906 article on Chicago: “The huddling together of the good and the bad, compelling the decent element of the colored people to witness the brazen display of vice of all kinds in front of their homes and in the faces of their children, are trying conditions under which to remain socially clean and respectable.”¹⁶ Similarly, Detroit’s African American reformers viewed the endemic crowding of the East Side as a barrier to creating a “socially clean and respectable” community. Establishing such a community, they hoped, would simultaneously counter negative white racist stereotypes and “uplift” newly arrived migrants. This project of sanitizing public space through class and gender segregation and hiding or removing evidence of vice dominated the reform agenda of migration-era black Detroit.

Northern racial uplift ideologues often presented a distorted image of southern migrants. They frequently described them as backward and primitive. A 1926 study of Detroit’s African American migrants, for example, characterized the typical migrant as a “rural, uneducated farmhand.”¹⁷ More than half of the migrants, however, had lived in cities before making their final journey to Detroit.¹⁸ Despite this fact, African Americans who lived in Detroit before the Great Migration shared reformers’ perceptions. “People came out of the plantation and tenant farms and their whole life, their culture was different,” argued one black Detroiter; “there is much difference in the culture of people who were tenant farmers down South than people who were raised up here.”¹⁹ In order to construct a positive community identity, reformers believed these perceived cultural differences had to be erased. The symbolic transformation of southern rural disorder into northern urban order through teaching migrants “respectable” behavior and self-presentation was a reform strategy that shaped major African American institutions in the early twentieth century. Yet by presenting a distorted view of the migrants’ past, this discourse ignored the extensive experience many middle-class and working-class migrants had with southern reform organizations and urban life. Likewise, reformers exaggerated the advantages and opportunities available in the urban North to migrants who accepted bourgeois norms of respectability.

The motivations for embracing racial uplift ideology differed along class lines. For the growing bourgeoisie, female uplift ideology helped to define middle-class and “respectable” working-class African Americans against a lower class whose members they believed did not follow rules of cleanliness, religiosity, and sexual purity.²⁰ Uplift ideology also spurred them to initiate a variety of reform programs to materially aid African American migrants in a period when the state and white private charities ignored the black needy. Underlying these programs was the effort to negate pervasive and pernicious white stereotypes of blacks. Many working-class African Americans understood the class-coded nature of racial uplift and used it to achieve social mobility, reinforcing norms of bourgeois respectability while using them for their own ends. Working-class women were particularly hopeful that the new reform organizations would help them break into white-collar and industrial employment and leave domestic service behind. Therefore, African American Progressive Era reform organizations had a broad base of support throughout the black community. For Mary Etta Glenn and thousands of other African American female migrants in Detroit, the common experiences of southern life would inspire institution building, political activism, and reform work on a large scale. These same women, however, would continue to debate categories of respectability that shaped class and gender relations in the urban North in fundamental ways.

In order to legitimate their own class status, racial uplift leaders contrasted their behavior and demeanor with those of poor and working-class African Americans. This reveals a central paradox in the logic of uplift ideology: on the one hand, African American elites were attempting to help the poor and working classes achieve middle-class standards of respectability; on the other hand, doing so would weaken the unique positions of leadership these men and women held. This paradox was resolved by an assertion of class hierarchy as a necessary aspect of racial evolution that would provide evidence to skeptical whites of African Americans’ progress. One white woman suggested at the turn of the century that “the best sign for the negroes of our land is that they are fast separating into classes,—a fact to which their white fellow-citizens but too often fail to attach the importance it deserves.”²¹ Kelly Miller, the dean of Howard University, believed industrial training and higher education were compatible strategies for racial uplift that would help reproduce class relations. “After making provision for the few people of any race who are capable to direct,” argued Miller, “there will be left sufficient to toil. The value of the triangle depends upon its altitude as well as upon its base.”²²

This geometric metaphor, the triangle of class hierarchy, was very much present in the discourse of female uplift ideology. For many female African American elites, it was a source of a painful contradiction. They viewed themselves as middle class and respectable, following Victorian rules of decorum; however, some whites viewed them as inherently licentious and unclean because of their race. Numerous articles and speeches touched on this subject, revealing the class consciousness of elite women. In 1904, Sylvanie Francaz Williams published one such article, “The Social Status of the Negro Woman,” in Voice of the Negro. Williams was responding to a statement published in 1904 in the Independent by a white women who argued: “I cannot imagine such a creature as a virtuous black woman.” This article became the focal point of numerous discussions about social purity and racial uplift in the African American community because it stated plainly what so many felt to be true: when a southern white man or woman saw an African American woman, he or she saw only a depraved and degraded individual. Williams wrote in response: “We could not, nor would not feel aggrieved, if in citing the immorality of the Negro, the accusation was limited to the pauperized and brutalized members of the race. But it is that broad condemnation without exception; that uncharitableness of thought and deed that casts a shadow of distrust over the women of an entire race, that offends.... Of all God’s creatures, the educated Negro woman is the most to be pitied.”²³ Having achieved middle-class status through education and having adopted the norms of respectability prescribed by female uplift ideology, Williams was still unable to become a “virtuous woman” in the eyes of southern whites. Her racial status superseded all other aspects of her identity in the South; she was not at the pinnacle of a triangle but within a shapeless, classless mass.

African American female reformers who sought to transform this racist vision of the black community used the gendered rhetoric of Progressive Era reform to their advantage. In 1897, Fannie Barrier Williams wrote in the AME Church Review: “Never before has the world been so interested in woman and woman’s work, and never before in our history have the people of this country been so much interested in colored women as it is to-day.”²⁴ African American women broadened and extended the Victorian “cult of true womanhood” to include goals of racial empowerment.²⁵ The practical limitations that shaped all African American women’s lives—the necessity to engage in wage work, to dispute accusations of immorality, and to protect themselves and their families from the daily psychological and physical violence of segregation—set them apart from their white counterparts and forged a different, if related, version of Victorian bourgeois ideology. Anne Firor Scott has suggested that “even more vehemently than white women, black women emphasized the home as the vital center of reform, and taught gentility as a counter to racial stereotypes, particularly those that labeled all black women as immoral.”²⁶ The virulent attacks on African American female moralit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Remaking Respectability
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Female Uplift Ideology, the Politics of Class, and Resettlement in Detroit
• 2 Reform and Public Displays of Respectability in Great Migration Detroit
• 3 The Informal Economy, Leisure Workers, and Economic Nationalism in the 1920s
• 4 Neighborhood Expansion and the Decline of Bourgeois Respectability in the 1920s
• 5 Economic Self-Help and Black Nationalism in the Great Depression
• 6 Grassroots Activism, New Deal Policies, and the Transformation of African American Reform in the 1930s
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series